View from the 'Xu

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Reblogged: Boston’s Next Tech Gold Mine

The May issue of Boston Magazine just hit stands, and it has a great piece that looks at what it calls Boston’s next tech gold mine: adtech. The article shines a spotlight on several of the innovative Boston companies working in the space, including DataXu!

MIT research served as the basis for DataXū, one of the Hub’s biggest ad-tech companies yet. It’s the company you’ve never heard of whose software is helping multinational corporations manage their ad campaigns in real-time. Currently valued at several hundred million dollars, with revenue well over $100 million in 2013, DataXū was fifth on last year’s “Inc. 5,000″ list of the fastest-growing private companies in America.

DataXū is just one of the local advertising and marketing companies racing to reach $1 billion in revenue. Of course, just getting to $100 million in revenue is a significant milestone; a billion dollars is rarer than rare, which is why venture capitalists call those companies that do “unicorns.” Even a fast-growing business typically needs 10 to 15 years to hit a billion dollars in sales. And yet that’s not out of the realm of reason for Boston’s recent startups.

If the ad-tech enterprises here can stay independent, they’re after big enough markets to become massive companies in their own right. But for that to happen, they’ll need determined leadership, patient investors, and a healthy stock market. If even one or two of these ad-tech companies succeed, they’ll break a two-decade cycle of Boston as a feeder market for larger tech companies elsewhere, making this industry the region’s next biotech. That would reshape the local real estate market, ripple through the job market, and restore some of the lost luster of the 1980s tech heyday.

It’s great to see this recogntion of our industry, especially here in Boston where we have such a wealth of marketing and advertising technology companies (like HubSpot, Fiksu, and Nanigans, all of which are included in the piece). Check out the full article here!

Do you think adtech is Boston’s next multi-billion dollar industry? Leave your thoughts in the comments.